Youth Talk

A week back I was standing at a check-out counter when the person in front of me held up the credit card-reading device and seemed to fumble with her pin. After about three seconds of that, she quickly whipped out her phone and voila! Problem solved. Or so it seemed.

That’s not how it was meant to be. The paranoid me believes that this could be an indication of us crawling towards the burden of technological dependency. Many people conveniently forget their four digit pins and eight digit phone numbers, storing them on password applications.

Is human intelligence and our attention spans agoing awry owing to our increased reliance on mobile devices? Do you remember your family members’ phone numbers? Do you recall where you place different objects? Do you struggle to remember your email password? There!

And, you know, this isn’t just my conservative personal view, digital amnesia is actually an issue today. The memorising capacity of new generations keeps decreasing. Gone are the days when we remembered birthdays, memorised speeches for English lessons at school and believed in mental checklists.

In fact, I personally make it a point to ‘dial’ numbers on my phone instead of fishing them from my contacts and aim to retain important phone numbers in my memory. I’ve memorised my car’s number plate too and I definitely remember my credit card pin!